What Is Publishing?

The best Web site is worthless unless people can see it. You can be the cream of the Web designer crop, but if no one can access your site, it doesn't matter a bit. Therefore, you have two choices when it comes to designing a Web site with Expression Web: You can either design the site live on a Web server that hosts your domain or you can create your site offline and then publish it to a live server.

Developing a site offline and then publishing it to a live server is always the preferred choice. If you develop directly against a live site, any problems you encounter while developing your site (and there will be some) will be visible to everyone who visits your site. You could, of course, put up one of those graphics that you see on many sites that say "Under Construction," but the way I see it, if a site is under construction, it should be on a development computer, not on a live Web server. After all, an artist doesn't paint a masterpiece while the canvas hangs on a museum wall. A professional Web developer will always develop a site offline and then publish it to the Internet or intranet.

Publishing is simply the process of copying Web content from one place to another. It might be content copied from one directory to another on the same machine, one Web site to another on the same machine, or from one machine to a different machine. You can also publish content to any of the numerous storage devices available today, such as a removable hard drive, a Universal Serial Bus (USB) key, or even a portable music player! If you can copy a file to a device or location, you can publish to it.

TIP

It might sound strange to publish a Web site to a portable music player, but it's actually a convenient way to carry copies of your Web site from place to place. I've got copies of several of my Web sites on my iPod, and it's been a great convenience to be able to access the files anytime I need them.